She’s been the face of Ralph Lauren, had an issue of Japanese Vogue dedicated to her and inspired fashion designers like Phillip Lim to model a bowl-cut hairdo on the runway after one of her bolder looks.

At 28, Japanese model Tao Okamoto is taking on the big screen as Mariko Yashida opposite Hugh Jackman for her acting debut in “The Wolverine.” Twentieth Century Fox will release the film in theaters July 26.

Like The Wall Street Journal, Twentieth Century Fox is also owned by News Corp.

In the Wolverine comic book series penned by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller during the early 1980s, Mariko has a large role in Wolverine’s trip to Japan.

In an interview with the Journal, Okamoto said that her character was decidedly different but couldn’t reveal how.

The Chiba native, did however, talked about playing Jackman’s love interest in the film while also picking a fight with him.

“Before I would go and do anything, I would imagine yourself doing what Jim [Mangold, the director] wanted me to do. He’s a big guy and I just make fun of him,” said Okamoto of Jackman. The actress is not fluent in English and considers it her second language.

Okamoto says she at first turned down the audition, which was pitched to her by a Japanese modeling agency. As soon as she heard Jackman was going to be in it and it was “X-Men” related, the model agreed to take a closer look. “I’m a huge fan of him,” she said.

She met Mangold in Los Angeles for a screen test and audition, which ultimately sold her on the role. The film was shot in Sydney although the film takes place in Tokyo, a city Okamoto is familiar with.

“Sometimes things looked a little Chinese and the producers were always asking me and they always kept making fixes along the way. I felt very important because they asked me over and over and listened,” she said.

While she occasionally struggled with the language, the model said the hardest part of filming, besides the technical know-how of understanding how close the camera needs to be (“it was very, very close, much closer than modeling ever was,” she said) was taking Wolverine seriously as a love interest.

“I just kept laughing, I was a little nervous,” she said.

Okamoto broke onto the modeling scene in Japan when she was 14 years old. “All those years, I learned how to be aggressive in front of the camera,” she said. “But in movies you have to talk too.”

It helped that Okamoto could identify with here character.

“My character comes from a rich family in Japan and has never lived a normal life. I have a similarity with her. I used to have a very difficult childhood because I was always the tallest girl in school and everybody was staring at me and saying ‘you are very different,’” said Okamoto. “Now different is good.”

About Speakeasy

Speakeasy is a blog covering media, entertainment, celebrity and the arts. The publication is produced by Barbara Chai and Jonathan Welsh with contributions from the Wall Street Journal staff and others. Write to us at speakeasy@wsj.com or follow us on Twitter at @WSJSpeakeasy or individually @barbarachai.